On The Road - Funda, The Fifth

More RaamaayaNaa, geekiness, no science (haven't had time to trough at the feeds), and so on

One more trip to Madras. Phew. Time to move? Not much this time by way of audio-visual media. Almost duffilled again, this time in Kavali. Completely forgot that the Madras-Tenali line is a double line, was blissfully waiting for the crossing train to cross, and wham, off she went. Made it back on board in one piece, as you can see. Almost slept all the way through to Hyderabad, luckily the pandemonium at Sec'bad was pandemoniacal.

This picture, of a tired Coromandel Express gliding into Central should soothe you.



The RaamaayaNa is suddenly all over the place. We pointed to one source in funda IV. We come back to find (via this Passion for Cinema post) that there's an animated movie called Mahayoddha Rama that's in the making apparently. The trailer shows a glimpse of what RaavaNa is going to look like. Most disappointing.

There seems to be (i.e. some (mostly North Indian) friends and acquaintances have told us) that this whole RaavaNa-as-a-sympathetic character is a figment of the loony Dravidian chauvinist fringe imagination. How then, to explain, that at least some of mainstream pauraNic Telugu cinema is very sympathetic to the dude? See any of the YouTube clips of Bhookailas, for example. RaavaNa is played by NTR, no less!

Or Falstaff's interpretation, more power to him. And also Nina Paley's (via Samanth).

In 2002, Nina Paley got dumped by her husband, over email. But instead of reaching for the nearest bottle of Prozac, Paley began to sketch. The result: Sita Sings the Blues, an animated retelling of the Ramayana and of Paley’s own break-up, set to the 1920s jazz of Annette Hanshaw.
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I didn’t understand why my husband had dumped me, or why I still loved him and wanted him back, but apparently Valmiki was writing about such things 3,000 years ago.

The Hackszine has a post on "Relational database using jQuery and HTML tables" i.e. a relational database implementation (joins and all!) that runs inside a web browser thanks to HTML and some voodoo called jQuery! Seems wayy too cool.

There is a somewhat intimidating discussion going on at Space Bar's. Positively terrifying, actually. Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann and all. There's something about writing poetry in a programming language or something that caught the eye, and we beg to drag everyone's attention to Perl Poetry.

Jacob Cass has 2 fantastic posts (1, 2) about "Awe Inspiring Must See Creative Photographs".

Sepia Mutiny has been most interesting, lately. Ennis points us to the "Kenya sings *" series. For example, Kenya sings India, i.e. Jana Gana Mana. Absolutely fantastic to see a bunch of Kenyans give it a go. National anthems don't do much for us, seeing as we're horribly afraid of nationalism and patriotism, but this is somehow different.

Abhi writes about the Washington Post's much talked about Pearls Before Breakfast experiment (wasn't this on NPR some time back?). The idea:

Writer Gene Weingarten helped orchestrate a brilliant “stunt” on commuters passing through L’Enfant Plaza last January in order to take a stab at settling the debate above. He took one of the most gifted violin players in the world, dressed him up as a humble busker in jeans, and asked him to play his 3.5 million dollar violin on the metro platform. Who would recognize brilliance? Who would even stop?

Go on, read the whole thing. All sorts of questions about art and taste will emerge.

Abhi also has a post provocatively titled Don't let your desi mom read this post.

Especially if you are a smart, attractive, single desi woman.
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Slate.com recently published, The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which makes use of game theory to explain why the best women often end up single and alone if they wait "too long" to get married.

Don't shoot the messenger.

We've either lost or lent out our copy of "A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South India".

:(